Head Full Of Steam live

Head Full Of Steam is Robert Forster’s most evocative lyric and – here I will have to disagree with Forster’s mum, who thinks People Say is the best song he’s ever written – his best song. The highlight of his recent London gig was Forster and band tearing into Head Full Of Steam with an absolute venom absent from other renditions I’ve heard.

Here’s The Go-Betweens playing Head Full Of Steam at the Hamburg Logo, 31 October 2000, which approaches the song in a countrified way redolent of Forster’s Warm Nights album. If anyone’s got a recording of the recent QEH gig, I’d love to hear it.

If you haven't seen the video for Head Full Of Steam, you should if only to decide whether Forster in 1986 was a proto-Jarvis Cocker or a lanky Prince.